Will’s useful reminder

President Obama read from the teleprompter at mind-numbing length yesterday before a friendly audience at Northwestern University (White House text here). In the speech Obama touted his economic record, mocked Republicans for opposing Obamacare, and made economic proposals that reflect the brain-dead state of contemporary liberalism. He also got in a gibe at FOX News, for entertaining heterodox thoughts on Obamacare. On the FOX News Special Report with Bret Baier last night, George Will commented on Obama’s speech (video below):

The president went to the state of Illinois to brag about the economy. Illinois has 300,000 fewer jobs than it had in 2008. For the last four years in the state of Illinois, the number of new food stamp recipients has increased twice as fast as the number of new job recipients. He was speaking in Illinois on a college campus. He did not mention that 40 percent of recent college graduates are either unemployed or underemployed — that is, in jobs that don’t require college degrees — and one in three recent college graduates is living at home with their parents.

Now, the president, we just heard, disparage trickle-down economics while bragging about doubling the stock market value. He is practicing trickle-down economics by doubling the stock market. He, and, for six years now, and most recently under his choice to be head of the Fed, Janet Yellen, have had zero interest rates, the intended effect of which is to drive people out of bonds and into assets like farm land, but particularly into stocks. That is why this has been a boon to the 10 percent of Americans who own 80 percent of all the directly owned stocks. And this is why 95 percent of the wealth created in the last six years have gone to the dreaded top one percent.

The “one percent” thing has issues of its own, but Will’s comments hoist Obama on his own petard.